Be a Friendly Neighborhood Sea Monster in ‘Tentacular,’ Out Now on Quest and Rift

It’s your 16th birthday, and like all teenagers, you’re still trying to find your place in the world. That’s even more difficult to do when you’re taller than most skyscrapers, have massively long tentacles, and generally strike fear into most people who meet you. But hey, at least you’re the star of Tentacular, which is out now on the Quest and Rift Platforms for $24.99 USD.

Tentacular isn’t your usual giant monster game. For one thing, your goal isn’t to destroy everything (at least not intentionally), and you don’t need to defend yourself from hostile humans. You’re actually a very gentle creature. In your spare time, you like to build huge sculptures and help out the citizens of the tropical island of La Kalma as much as you can.

They’ll give you tasks that only someone of your beefy size and stature can complete, like cleaning up the town dump or stacking some shipping containers on top of each other. Along the way, you’ll even find strange artifacts that will offer some clues about who you really are and where you came from.

To find out more about developer Firepunchd’s endearing monster-out-of-water story, we chatted with Tentacular Co-Creator Luca Scaramuzzino.

Luca Scaramuzzino: Yes! But also Tentacular is actually a rarely used adjective meaning “tentacle-having” or “tentacle-looking.” It has a good ring to it. We settled with this name relatively late during the production, but I’m happy that we did.

LS:Tentacular is our first commercial VR game. Simon Cubasch and I were very active in the game jam scene in Berlin, where we are both based. Our first weird appendage game was called Hatchlings, a local multiplayer co-op game with little alien creatures that use the snorkel/elephant trunk on their head to manipulate various objects on their planet. That was our entry for the 2015 Global Game Jam.

The first time we had access to a room-scale VR setup was in 2016 when we joined a 48-hour game jam organized by some friends. Simon, me, and some other friends set the foundation for a kaiju tentacle monster game—a crude prototype that was already a lot of fun.

LS: When we approached the giant monster idea, we pretty soon realized that most of the action was going to happen on the floor, making for a terrible VR experience. We figured out that if the monster was aquatic it could be partially submerged, thus having the city at a more comfortable chest-high level. We decided to go with tentacles at first simply because I had a model ready that I used for a talk I gave a couple of months before the jam. Simon had the idea, and everybody on the team was sold in half a second.

That was the initial premise, and we eventually invested a lot of time on refining the story and somehow made a giant tentacle monster fit into the plot. But we don’t want to spoil the origin or the nature of the monster for anyone that’s going to play the game!

LS: We found that a big metropolis wouldn’t have worked with the kind of wholesome silly game we had in mind. Also, since the monster’s locomotion is restricted by water, a giant city would have been mostly inaccessible to the player.

We got our inspiration for La Kalma from Mediterranean coastal villages, but not any place in particular. I just tried to evoke the sleepy, cozy atmosphere of the places I visited growing up in Italy.

LS: Let’s say there was a lot of giggling involved. We started production without a specific game design goal. We knew that the game was going to be about a benevolent giant tentacle monster, but the core mechanics weren’t set in stone yet. So after we implemented the first iteration of a pair of working tentacles, we started experimenting in different directions.

For example, we contemplated a level where the monster was supposed to run its own hot dog stand for human clientele, preparing impossibly small sandwiches. At some point the plot had a dating app for monsters called Linger. In an early prototype, you were supposed to use your tentacles as a baseball bat. Also, lasers!

We’re considering adding back some of the ideas we had in future updates, but lately we’ve been very focused on the actual release. Being a small team means that we’re agile and we can adapt very fast. The game changed in scope several times. Some levels got scrapped because we realized they were more fun in our imagination than in the actual game, and that’s fine.

LS: Developing our “tentacle tech” was a little challenging. We started over several times, and we tweaked their behavior a lot. They can still be a little capricious at times, but we like how meaty and natural they feel during gameplay and how they convey some sense of weight to the player. We had a lot of positive feedback, especially from veteran VR gamers. The physics of the game really helped with immersion. We kept UI elements at a minimum: All the controls, including the option screen, are physical buttons like levers and sliders.

Despite being an incredibly silly game with a rather wacky premise, we put a lot of effort into the narrative aspect of the game. We felt that creating a cohesive world through the whole game was necessary to anchor the player to the experience instead of just being shuffled from task to task with an arbitrary score to meet.

LS: When we started developing Tentacular, a lot of the games on the market were basically tech demos with very shallow gameplay and minuscule scope. We could have gone the same route: make a generic destruction kaiju game with tentacles and release it within months instead of years, make a quick buck, and move on. But we couldn't bring ourselves to do it. We saw the potential in Tentacular and decided that it deserved more love.

It was a risky move. Back then, the most successful VR games were mostly shooters and games with other serious settings. So positioning ourselves inside the “wholesome games” niche in a market that was already niche was somewhat nerve-racking. But we figured out that if we were so in love with the game, then someone else out there might enjoy it, too.

Put those tentacles to work in Tentacular on the Quest and Rift Platforms.